One of the things that Covid exposed in education is the extent to which learning has become transactionalised. When face-to-face engagements were removed and technology took centre stage, it was highly noticeable that the learning platforms with which we are all now familiar, managed transactions: "watch this video, respond to this forum, write this essay, here are your marks".
Of course, education has basically been this for a very long time, but with the removal of the physical context, the raw transactions seemed particularly cold. There is a yearning to "get back to normal" - despite the fact that "normal" is little different in terms of the transactions of education, or indeed, its platforms. But the physical context of education makes the transactional stuff bearable - and perhaps this is a problem.
As institutions massified their operations, making things more transactional appeared an essential requirement to deal with scale. The only way this could be done without people complaining was to amplify the compensation for transactionalisation. That was the coffee bar, the sports hall, the evermore plush (and expensive) student accommodation, and so on. There are very important educational and developmental things going on in these contexts, and while they obscured the transactional coldness of the business of the university, university managers might have believed that the transactionalising of education could continue unabated.
The online move has represented a change of physiological context. It is not a matter of online vs face-to-face, but different epigenetic environments (myself and a couple of friends wrote about this a while ago: Covid-19 and the Epigenetics of Learning | SpringerLink). The biology of learning has barely touched on this, but fundamental to any biological learning adaptation is the construction of a niche within which growth and development is possible. We don't as yet have the means of studying this in detail, but it seems to me that understanding the processes of niche-construction is essential if we are to have institutions which embrace the technological context that we are all now in and encourage dialogue.
What is a niche? It is a home. At a systems level, it is taming of the complexities of the environment such that growth is possible. Think of a spider's web - that is a niche which the spider constructs. We do the same in education, but a niche in education creates the conditions for dialogue. When Rupert Wegerif talks about the importance of trust (here: What is a 'dialogic self'? - Rupert Wegerif), that is the process of establishing a home for learners and teachers together, which makes their communications not only possible, but probable.
I'm very interested in how niches are constructed. Niches are not constructed through transactions: something else happens, and I think this is what was missing in our Covid technological experiments.
The key feature of a niche is pattern (again, think of a Spider's web, a bird's nest, beehive, etc). Information theorists call pattern "redundancy", and I find this technical description useful. Patterns can be formed by the rules of a game (although "rules" themselves emerge through patterns of interaction). More deeply, I think patterns are discovered through a deep physiological engagement. It is the root of intersubjectivity - what Alfred Schutz called "tuning-in to the inner-world of each other". When we do "ice-breakers", this is what is really happening.
What I think is particularly remarkable is that deep questioning in the light of some shared experience can begin to reveal a niche for dialogue. There is a difference between deep questions and shallow questions: it may be a physiological difference. Certainly, thinking deeply feels different to shallow thinking. Why is this?
It's as if we spin our webs inside us, and join them up at their deepest point. The deepest point (and this was I think, something Schutz was aware of, even if he didn't spell it out) is that we are all made of the same cell-stuff. So does the depth go right back into our cells? Our current cognitive/neuro obsessions prevent us from thinking this, I suspect - but neurons are cells: in fact they are cells which stem from the same developmental "germ layer" as our skin, and like all cells, they share their earliest developmental zygotic processes with all living creatures (you can see the germ layers being formed in this amazing video: Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six pulsing minutes of timelapse | Aeon Videos). Is thinking "deep" going back to evolutionary origins where we all came from? Is that our real niche?
If this deep niche construction is what is needed for dialogue, then the transactional and shallow focus of institutional organisation needs to change. While dialogue is the central purpose of all education, the institutional conditions for dialogue are the institutional conditions to facilitate niche construction at a scalable level. Technology can, I believe, help us to do this.
There is no reason why the physiological conditions of learning cannot embrace technology or even remote engagement. But I think starting to think about the physiology before we think about the transactions is critical. Creative activities or games, for example, are not just a "different" kind of activity; they are deeper physiologically. This is quite obvious when we see kids engaging with each other on Twitch.
The niche is where the light gets in...
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